I've spent another couple days this week away from my office at the OU, helping some colleagues agree the final structure and content of our new cybervandalism course, T187. The facilities at the conference centre, Harben House, run by Initial, were fine. What did really irritate me, though, was trying to access my weblog from their internet cafe and discovering it was censored by their filter software, which declared that my thoughts here might be unsuitable for children.

Do contact them about inappropriate filtering, if you feel so inclined. I've complained and been told my complaint would be reviewed by a human being. I wonder how many other filter software packages block these pages, presumably because the url and blog title contain the letters 'xxx'?

I spent a couple of days in Barcelona last week, one at the terrific Univeritat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC), the virtual university, where I met a group of like minded enthusiasts for the deployment of technology in education, who actually understood what can and cannot be done with technology in that context.

I shouldn't be surprised at this but it is such a rarity in the thick of all the nonsense that gets talked, written about and done in the name of computers in education that it was an absolutely delightful day. UOC have grown from about 300 to 30000 students in about ten years. They have also in that time been learning the same lessons, as an institution, that those of us in the Open University in the UK who have been deeply engaged in deploying multimedia computer and Internet facilitated education with large numbers of students over a similar period have learnt about the potential, current limitations and practicalities of technological tools in an educational context.

I only hope our wonderful hosts, Sylvia Gonzalez and Ferran Gimenez Prado, found it as useful as we did.

The NYT are reporting that the FBI were given millions of passenger records by airlines in the says after the September 11th tragedies. Seems like a pretty sensible course of action for the FBI to request such records given the circumstances. They used subpoenas, so it was all above board. The only question, I guess, is regarding the boundaries of the request and the quantity of information handed over. Apparently at least one airline provided a year's worth of records.

The ID card draft bill is proposing to create quite a few new offenses, like disobeying an order from the Secretary of State. I hope one of the draftsmen have put that in as a joke to test how well this thing is going to get scrutinised? Think of it - in a democracy there could actually be an offense of refusing to follow the orders of a public servant. It also includes little incentives like a £2500 fine every time someone fails to turn up for an appointment for a biometrics scan (Section 6(4)). Jailtime for having someone else's card in your possession (don't offer to look after a friend's belongings whilst they respond to the call of nature then). All this draconian stuff is just an initial extreme pitch, so that Mr Blunkett can be seen to be making "reasonable concessions" when the actual law gets passed. Simon Davies of Privacy International is right - this whole shambles is a "disgrace to democracy."

A draft bill for a national ID card is online. There are lots of stories round about the ID card in the UK press today. Ministers are peddling the usual propaganda in favour and by and large journalists are lapping it up unquestioningly. Regarding the test progamme with ten thousand volunteers I have mixed feelings. I'm irritated with it because it's a waste of money and primarily a PR exercise. But at the same time I think it's a good idea because proponents and ordinary people, to whom the idea is intuitively and superficially attractive, will finally get to see how bad this 'state of the art', 'impossible to fool' biometric technology is in reality. The Australians did an ID card trial in the 90s and quietly abandoned the notion, having discovered how many problems it caused. Let's hope the UK version goes the same way

On the day that the UK government launch their controversial pilot national ID card scheme with ten thousand volunteers, Privacy International have released an interim report on a study of the connection between ID cards and preventing terrorism. Not surprisingly, "Mistaken Identity; Exploring the Relationship Between National Identity Cards & the Prevention of Terrorism" concludes that ID cards do not help to prevent terrorism.

NYT: Pentagon Ban on Pictures of Dead Troops Is Broken

EUpolitix has a succinct report on MEPs taking on the Commission and the US over the deal on the transfer of airline passenger data.

Brad Templeton, chairman of the EFF, amongst other things, has produced a thoughtful analysis of the 'GMail Saga'.

The Bush administration is apparently proposing to give ally countries another 2 years to devop biometric passports. Secretary of State Colin Powell says

"Rushing a solution to meet the current deadline virtually guarantees that we will have systems that are not operable... Such a result may undercut international acceptance of this new technology as well as compound rather than ease our overall challenge."

The European Commission have issued a Communication on the Management of
Copyright and Related Rights. In it they eulogise digital rights management (DRM) as the solution to all ills of the copyright variety, most specifically this time royalty collection agencies problems. What is it about biometric national ID cards, DRM, RFIDs, electronic voting machines, computers, technology in general that make them superficially attractive solutions to everything? The right technology appropriately deployed can be a terrific boon but why can't people understand that it is not usually a particularly good idea to start with a [technological] 'solution' and then go looking for a problem, just so you can use the 'solution'?

A Barcelona night club is allegedly implanting RFID chips in VIP customers so they don't need to worry about carrying a wallet about. No comment.

Despite the pending lawsuit against ClearPlay and others by the Directors Guild of America and the movie studios, it appears as though Walmart is going to be selling DVD players with ClearPlay filters built in. I wonder what the demand will be like and how that will affect the dynamics of the court case?

The United States Institute of Peace, which I admit I'd never prviously heard of, have issued a paper saying terrorists use the Internet too but for more routine activities than the hyped-up cyberterrorism feedstuff of the mainstream media. Terrorist organisations are said to have three major audiences:
Current and potential supporters
International public opinion
Enemy publics (i.e. citizens of states they are fighting)
and use the Net in 8 different (sometimes overlapping) ways:
Psychological warfare
Publicity and propaganda
Data mining
Fundraising
Recruitment and mobilisation
Networking
Sharing information
Planning and coordination

The report does imply that steganography is in widespread use by terrorist organisations but there is no direct evidence offered to that effect. The mainstream media has periodically salivated at the notion of religeous fundamentalist terrorists hiding messages in online porn but no evidence to that effect has been forthcoming. Being only 12 pages long the paper is just an overview I assume but it might be interesting to hear more details of the study.

Wonderful Ed Helms skit at Comedy Central about e-voting. Not to be missed. This kind of comedy does more to communicate the problems with electronic voting than all the ranting that I do on the subject.

Jay Rosen has a thoughtful analysis of the recent furore over inappropriate comments by a Democrat-supporting blogger. Another example of the scandalmongering of mainstream politics and media out-manoeuvering the democratising potential of the net.

The Berkman Center at Harvard have done an interesting study on Apple's iTunes service focussing on

Interaction between Copyright and Contract Law
Digital Rights Management
Digital First Sale Doctrine
Fair Use Doctrine

Worth a look.

There are two lovely essays in Bruce Schneier's latest Crypto-Gram, one on national identity cards and the second on the economic incentives to rig electronic voting machines. On national ID cards:

"But my primary objection isn't the totalitarian potential of national
IDs, nor the likelihood that they'll create a whole immense new class
of social and economic dislocations. Nor is it the opportunities they
will create for colossal boondoggles by government contractors. My
objection to the national ID card, at least for the purposes of this
essay, is much simpler.

It won't work. It won't make us more secure.

In fact, everything I've learned about security over the last 20 years
tells me that once it is put in place, a national ID card program will
actually make us less secure.

My argument may not be obvious, but it's not hard to follow,
either. It centers around the notion that security must be evaluated
not based on how it works, but on how it fails.

It doesn't really matter how well an ID card works when used by the
hundreds of millions of honest people that would carry it. What
matters is how the system might fail when used by someone intent on
subverting that system: how it fails naturally, how it can be made to
fail, and how failures might be exploited.

The first problem is the card itself. No matter how unforgeable we
make it, it will be forged. And even worse, people will get legitimate
cards in fraudulent names...

... the main problem with any ID system is that it requires the
existence of a database. In this case it would have to be an immense
database of private and sensitive information on every American -- one
widely and instantaneously accessible from airline check-in stations,
police cars, schools, and so on.

The security risks are enormous. Such a database would be a kludge of
existing databases; databases that are incompatible, full of erroneous
data, and unreliable. As computer scientists, we do not know how to
keep a database of this magnitude secure, whether from outside hackers
or the thousands of insiders authorized to access it.

And when the inevitable worms, viruses, or random failures happen and
the database goes down, what then? Is America supposed to shut down
until it's restored?

Proponents of national ID cards want us to assume all these problems,
and the tens of billions of dollars such a system would cost -- for
what? For the promise of being able to identify someone?"

Tim O'Reilly doesn't understand all the fuss about Google's Gmail and privacy.

Apparently the EU parliament's civil liberties committee has decided to delay the 'ill considered' proposal on biometric passports until the autumn.

Statewatch is also reporting on this "Commission’s EU biometric passport proposal exceeds the EC’s powers
- no powers conferred upon the EC by the EC Treaty, taken separately or together, confer upon the EC the power to adopt the proposed Regulation"

At least one online pundit agrees with me about media having a short attention span. This one sees a possible danger for bloggers and provides an interesting perspective on the hounding of a Democratic party activist blogger, Markos Moulitsas Zuniga, who writes the Daily Kos, for posting an inappropriate/tasteless comment on his blog.

Largely unnoticed about a month ago the EU launched PRIME, a four year project to

"Develop solutions to empower individuals to control their private sphere and manage their identities; "

and

"Trigger persuasive deployment of privacy-enhancing identity management solutions. "

-according to the website. Theoretically the EU Commission has been pushing PETs (privacy enhancing technologies) for some time and one of the principles is to minimise the amount of personal data collected. There are two fundamental problems:

1. The Blair/Blunkett and by extension the EU Council of Ministers simple solution to terrorism - collect as much personal data about the entire population of the world as possible, in the hope that you can kid people into believing you're actually tackling terrorism;

And

2. Though we all say, when asked, that we are concerned about our personal privacy, we do very little actively to protect it e.g. how many people think about the privacy implications of their supermarket store cards.

Ah well, at least somebody is working on it.

David Blunkett and Tony Blair are continuing to exploit the Madrid bombings unconscionably, by pushing forward the introduction of biometric national ID cards by 2008, as their "we must do something" response.

This capitalising on others' tragedy is politics at its lowest.

They are prepared to spend billions of pounds on a system which won't work and will, in the process undermine fundamental freedoms in the UK that people have fought and died for, just to extract some transcient and superficial "tough on terrorism" headlines from a media with a short attention span.

If Mr Blunkett does get to be prime minister off the back of this then we will deserve what we get, for letting him get away with propering from this poisonous snake oil he is currently selling. Liberty, price and eternal vigilance come to mind on the one hand and not just the media but a short attention span society and general apathy on the other. It's big, it costs a fortune and hey it involves new technology, so most of us will buy it. Especially because the real solutions, if there are any, are long term and too hard for us to deal with.

Mr Blair has decided to fast track David Blunkett's national ID card system to try and distract people from the immigration fiasco that has prompted Home Office (in charge of immigration) minister Beverly Hughes' resignation.

John Lettice at the Register has a nice dissection of this as a complete sham. His concluding paragraphs are absolutely damning:



" Now, here is the problem as best as can be established at the moment. The
size of the backlog of immigration cases (both asylum and general) has been a
major issue for the current government, and Hughes (who reported to David
Blunkett at the Home Office) was presiding over the acceleration of the
processing of applications. It appears that in at least some areas this
acceleration process resulted in the systematic rubber-stamping of
applications. Cases from Bulgaria and Rumania have been cited where forged
documents were approved, and where pro forma business plans were sold to
applicants fraudulently applying under a programme designed to bring in
self-sustaining business startups. Allegedly, the UK authorities were alerted to
these fraudulent applications and to their rubber stamping, and Hughes herself
had the matter drawn to her attention last year by one of her own ministers.

So friends, what do we have here? If we had ID cards, what would have been
happening? At the same time as Blunkett's Home Office has been thumping
the ID card tub on the basis of its efficacy against crime, terrorism and illegal
immigration, that very same Home Office has known as a matter of record
(this is not, we accept, the same as actually knowing or even noticing) that it's
been granting immigrant status to people who are not going to perform in
accordance with what it says on the tin they just bought. Granted they're a lot
more likely to be one-legged Bulgarian plumbers who don't know anything
about plumbing than terrorists, but still... Their application rubber-stamped,
under the future system they would then have been issued with ID cards, and
would have happily acquired a perfectly legitimate UK identity on the basis of
whatever it was they'd chosen to fill in. Moral: the Home Office might be best
advised to sort out the loopholes and system failures it already has before
introducing new ones to fix. "

The European Parliament have rejected Commissioner Bolkestein's deal with the US to share airline passenger data for use in CAPPS II, because it breaches EU privacy laws. It was a close vote 229 to 202 but the resolution suggested they'd go to the European Court of Justice on the matter if necessary.

The copyright bills are coming out of Congress thick and fast. The latest is the "Piracy Deterrence and Education Act" (PDEA) according to Declan. More of the usual, this time pressurising the FBI to chase the copyright infringers. I guess it's a variation on the DOJ. It's also a variation on the Author, Consumer, and Computer Owner Protection and Security Act (ACCOPS) proposed last year which was suggesting 5 year prison terms and $250 000 fines for sharing a single file.

"One part of the PDEA that did not appear in earlier bills would require the FBI to "facilitate the sharing" of information among Internet providers, copyright holders and police. "

And so the procession rolls on.

James Grimmelmann has a wicked April fools joke over at Lawmeme about the RIAA suing Google. I wonder how far that one will spread.

A Canadian judge has put a spoke in the gathering momentum of the IFPI's campaign of lawsuits against individual file sharers. He has denied the Canadian Recording Industry Association (CRIA) request to identify individuals alleged to be involved in P2P file sharing. He even declared file sharing legal in Canada, including uploading. "The mere fact of placing a copy on a shared directory in a computer where that copy can be accessed via a P2P service does not amount to distribution," he wrote. "Before it constitutes distribution, there must be a positive act by the owner of the shared directory, such as sending out the copies or advertising that they are available for copying." Expect an appeal from the CRIA probably faster than you can blink.

Slashdot has links to a collection of stories about the IFPI lawsuits against individuals.

There is an absolutely fascinating paper, Privacy in a Noise Society, which I've just come across on the web, by Nicklas Lundblad of the St Anna Institute in Stokholm. He puts his finger on one of the key issues relating to privacy in an information society and that is that "...anyone but not everyone can be mapped in detail...We live in a society where it is possible to chart the lives of anyone, but not the lives of everyone." Information overload and cost effectively preclude the latter.

Essential reading.

Kim Zetter at Wired has written a longish article about the dangers of e-voting. Worth a look. Wired has an archive of stories on the e-voting issue, headed up "Machine politics" which I'd suggest is a good starting point for anyone with concerns about the use of computers in elections.

Zetter's article gives an idea of the timeline of when and key folk involved in the publicising of the problems, such as Rebecca Mercuri, Bev Harris, David Allen, Avi Rubin, Yoshi Kohno, Adam Stubblefield, David Dill, David Jefferson, Nebraska Sen. Chuck Hagel (Republican) and New Jersey Rep. Rush Holt (Democrat). It's largely told from Harris' perspective.

IFPI affiliated music industry associations in Denmark, Italy, Germany and Canada have launched lawsuits against hundreds of individuals. (FWIW it's about 120 in Denmark, 30 in Italy, 29 in Canada and 68 in Germany). Look out for comments from the usual suspects.

Aaron Swartz, in parallel, has launched a wiki for annotating and editing Larry Lessig's new book, Free Culture.

Ernest Miller over the weekend has concluded that the PIRATE Act will faciltate wiretapping for civil copyright infringement.

"...having thought about the proposed law a little more, I came to an interesting realization: you can get wiretaps for federal copyright infringement investigations...

...Under a regular civil suit for copyright infringement by means of file sharing, the copyright holder can only observe that the infringing files are available for download. They can't really tell how many people have downloaded them, if any. Furthermore, copyright holders have no way of going after people who are only downloading files and not uploading them. Wiretaps to the rescue. The RIAA may not be permitted to wiretap file sharers, but the government certainly can. The RIAA must be salivating at the prospect."

The entertainment industry's latest attempt to get their representatives in Congress to pass favorable laws has produced the proposed Protecting Intellectual Rights Against Theft and Expropriation Act (PIRATE Act). (What a name). The idea this time is to save the copyright holders the trouble and expense of having to sue for copyright infringement. The responsibility for that would now be with the Department for Justice (i.e. taxpayers). As Donna says, the industry reject compulsory licences because they don't want government interference in the private sector but it's ok for the government to interfere when it involves them picking up the industry's legal costs. This is a sad joke.

James Grimmelmann at Lawmeme has a wonderfully cutting perspective on US reaction the WTO's decision to declare the US in breach of international trade rules in relation to online gambling policies. I hope he won't mind me reproducing it in full here:

'Remember why those folks in Seattle were so mad at the WTO? Well, one of the big reasons was that local laws in developing countries (on issues such as environmental protection, labor standards, and cultural values) were at risk of being struck down as "barriers to trade." Trade is trade, said the U.S., and trade comes first, and countries just need to shut up and deal.

Well, oh how the tables have turned. A WTO panel ruled on Wednesday that the U.S. ban on online gambling is an illegal trade barrier. Outraged U.S. lawmakers have already promised to appeal. Surprise, surprise, the ideology that free trade trumps restrictive local values turns out to be much less appealing when the U.S. interests are aligned with "local values" instead of "free trade." '

An international coalition of civil liberties groups, led by Privacy International and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) have signed an open letter to the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) on the grave dangers of vast biometric-passenger-data sharing systems. Thanks to Ian Brown at FIPR for the following extract from Privacy International's media release:

The letter, spearheaded by Privacy International and the American Civil
Liberties Union (ACLU) raises concerns about little-known plans to
imminently create international standards that will require the use of
biometrics and RFID (radio frequency) technology in all future
passports. The measures, being decided this week at a meeting of the
ICAO in Cairo, will result in a distributed international identification
database on all passport holders.

The open letter has been signed by, among others, the Electronic
Frontier Foundation, Statewatch, the UK based Foundation for Information
Policy Research, the Association for Progressive Communications and the
US based Privacy Rights Clearinghouse.

The ICAO has agreed that the initial international biometric standard
for passports will be facial mapping. Adequate memory space in newly
issued passports will be reserved for additional biometrics such as
fingerprinting at the discretion of every government. The EU is already
calling for fingerprints to be included, along with an associated
European register of all biometrics. National authorities will store and
share these vast data reserves.

The measures, supported by the US and the EU, will ultimately create an
electronic ID system on hundreds of millions of travellers. Despite
serious implications for privacy and personal security, the process is
occurring without public engagement or debate. Rather than allowing this
important issue to be decided by parliaments, governments have delegated
the setting of standards to the ICAO, a UN-level organization that is
responsible for the standardization of travel documents, passenger data
systems and air travel requirements.

The legislative drivers for the ICAO system are already in pace. The
USA-PATRIOT Act, passed by the U.S. Congress after the events of
September 2001 included the requirement that the President certify a
biometric technology standard for use in identifying aliens seeking
admission into the U.S., within two years. The schedule for its
implementation was accelerated by another piece of legislation, the
little known Enhanced Border Security and Visa Entry Reform Act 2002.
Part of this second law included seeking international co-operation with
this standard. The incentive to international co-operation was made
clear:


"By October 26, 2004, in order for a country to remain eligible for
participation in the visa waiver program its government must certify
that it has a program to issue to its nationals machine-readable
passports that are tamper-resistant and which incorporate biometric and
authentication identifiers that satisfy the standards of the
International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO)."


These laws gave momentum to the standards that were being considered at
the ICAO by requiring visa waiver countries (which include many EU
countries, Australia, Brunei, Iceland, Japan, Monaco, New Zealand,
Norway, Singapore, and Slovenia) to implement biometrics into their
Machine-Readable Travel Documents (MRTDs), i.e. passports.

Based on projections from current passport and travel statistics,
biometric details of more than a billion people will be electronically
stored by 2015. Some of the countries sampled for this estimate are:

United States 90 million
United Kingdom 54 million
Japan 64 million
Canada 24 million
Australia 13 million
Russian Federation 50 million
Ireland 4 million
Taiwan 17 million
China 60 million

The Privacy International open letter warns:

"We are increasingly concerned that the biometric travel document
initiative is part and parcel of a larger surveillance infrastructure
monitoring the movement of individuals globally that includes
Passenger-Name Record transfers, API systems and the creation of an
intergovernmental network of interoperable electronic data systems to
facilitate access to each country's law enforcement and intelligence
information."

Privacy International has warned of "unprecedented" security threats
that could arise from the plan because of potential access by terrorists
and organised crime. Furthermore, the biometric standard being adopted
is "fundamentally flawed" and will result in a substantial number of
passengers being falsely identified as potential terrorists or wrongly
accused of holding fraudulent passports.

Dr Gus Hosein, Senior Fellow with Privacy International, warned: "This
is a potentially perilous plan. The ICAO must go back to the drawing
board or hold itself responsible for creating the first truly global
biometric database".

"Governments may claim that they are under an international obligation
to create national databases of fingerprints and face scans but we will
soon see nations with appalling human rights records generating massive
databases, and then requiring our own fingerprints and face-scans as we
travel."

He continued: "In January 2004 when the U.S. began fingerprinting and
face-scanning foreign visitors and storing this data for over fifty
years under the US-VISIT program, many countries responded with alarm.
With the biometric passport, however, every country may have its own
surveillance system, accumulating fingerprints and face-scans and
keeping them for as long as they wish with no regard to privacy or civil
liberties."

Larry Lessig has persuaded his publishers, Penguin, to make his new book, Free Culture, available online under a creative commons licence, Cory Doctorow style.

It looks as though Microsoft may have pulled a fast one on the EU according to Dan Gillmor and Andrew Orlowski. Regardless of whether you love or hate the company, in some ways you've got to have a sneaking admiration for Microsoft or at least the smart people they employ. Even when they are apparently under the cosh they're always looking to outwit the authorities and usually do.

Interesting essay in Spiked by Brendan O'Neill: Creating the enemy. Extract:



Over the past 10 to 15 years, the politics of fear and caution have come to dominate Western societies. Where political life previously consisted of debates and disagreements about what kind of society we wanted to live in, today it tends to focus on issues of safety and perceived risks to our health, environment or 'way of life'. The exhaustion of the political traditions of Left and Right has had a profoundly disorientating impact across Western society, shattering the consensus upon which basic questions of politics and morality have been decided throughout recent history. Faith in what were traditionally considered 'Western' values or institutions, from democratic politics to medical science, from the church to the monarchy, has been steadily eroded. Gaining agreement on any issue, from genetic modification and abortion to the role of the family and the issue of recreational drugs, has become increasingly fraught and subject to abitrary considerations.

We live in an era of great uncertainty, in which political leaders stand isolated from the public and unsure of what they believe in, and individuals have a weakened sense of community, solidarity or identity. This is enough to put society in a constant state of powerlessness and vulnerability - even without terrorist attacks."

Mr Blunkett's ID card scheme is running on apace.

"Mr Harrison" [the head of the Home Office's identity card policy unit] "also outlined the latest Home Office thinking on on whether or not the one million Irish nationals living in Britain will have to carry UK identity cards...

Mr Harrison told a Law Society conference yesterday that
ministers had started with the assumption that information on
the pattern of everyday transactions involving each card would
not be kept on the central computer database.

But following representations from the information commissioner
they were now minded to keep information "about the audit of
transactions" to allow the authorities to investigate abuses of the
scheme...

The senior Home Office official also revealed the current thinking
on how to deal with the Irish problem. The 1949 Ireland Act
specifies that Irish citizens living in Britain enjoy total freedom of
movement between the two countries...

Mr Harrison said the plan now was to allow Irish nationals in
Britain to choose whether to be treated on an equivalent basis to
a British national or as an EU foreign national. He said there
would be a separate document which Irish nationals could obtain
which would not be a foreign national's resident's permit to
reflect their special status. "

Donna is getting some help with Copyfight. Elizabeth Rader, Aaron Swartz, Jason Schultz, Wendy Seltzer and Ernest Miller. They don't come much smarter than that lot. I wonder if it is something about people with names with 'z' in them, that raises the IQ (Ernest being the exception that proves the rule)?

Donna's first post to the new collective relates to the latest challenge coming out of Stanford's CIS to the Copyright Term Extension Act. With Golan v Ashcroft also coming out of that stable Lessig and co. seem determined, as James Grimmelmann so eloquently suggests, to salvage the phoenix from the Eldred case Supreme Court ashes. Better go update my link to copyfight now it has moved back to Corante.

The Guardian leader today shares my perpective on David Blunkett's intention to take advantage of the Madrid bombings to introduce ID cards. The illusion of security is the enemy of security.

UK Home Secretary, David Blunkett, is back to his hobby horse of trying to get his national ID card scheme implemented again and has Cabinet colleagues complaining about his sneaky tactics.

According to Mary Hodder and the smoking gun, Donald Trump has applied for a trademark on the phrase "You're Fired". Mary notes that "You're Outsourced" is still available.

A "True Name and Address" bill for all filesharers has been introduced in California. Ernest Miller is not impressed.

"The basic idea of the bill is to extend a "true name and address" statute to cover virtually all exchanges of copyrighted audiovisual information. That is, if you send someone a copy of a recording or audiovisual work electronically without also providing your true name and address, you could be fined $2,500 and spend a year in the clink...

We need to have a "true names" bill for politicians. By all rights, State Sen. Kevin Murray" [who is sponsoring the bill] "should start calling himself State Sen. Hollywood Sycophant."

I guess something similar could be said of Bill Lockyer, California's attorney general after his recent call to arms to fellow AGs about "dangerous" P2P software. 'Hollywood Ingratiator General' anyone?

As Ernest says,

"And what is this? Hollywood can't afford to sue people? We citizens of California have to expend precious tax dollars and limited law enforcement resources on copyright enforcement because Hollywood is too darn cheap? With massive statutory copyright damages available as a remedy, there is no excuse for Hollywood not to prosecute copyright infringers directly. Heck, it could even be a profit center."

The Council of Europe's Convention on Cybercrime has been ratified today by Lithuania. "Following this fifth ratification, the Convention will enter into force on 1st July 2004 for Albania, Croatia, Estonia, Hungary and Lithuania. "

Kazaa duo's next call at Mercury news is a nice piece about Kazaa founders Niklas Zennstrom's and Janus Friis's new Net telephony service Skype. I vaguely recall seeing exactly this report somewhere last year but can't remember where at the moment.

The Eolas v Microsoft patent infringement case is testing the procedures in the US Patent Office, as well as the courts, as the patent is to be subjected to further review. Paul Festa says, "The next round in Microsoft's Web browser patent fight will unfold in an obscure bureaucratic proceeding that offers the company and its allies few, if any, chances to argue their side."

SNP MEP Neil MacCormick has offered a gentle critique of fellow MEPs Malcolm Harbour's (Conservative) and Arlene McCarthy's (Labour) support for the EU's intellectual property enforcement directive.

"There is no doubt that the EU should take action against counterfeiting and piracy...

...However, valid questions must be raised as to whether all the measures passed last week in the European Parliament are the correct ones - or whether some of them may bring unintended but serious consequences...

...Malcolm and Arlene argue that the EU directive has always been intended to tackle professional, commercial scale counterfeiting. Maybe so. It's just a pity that the final version which they voted for last week doesn't fully achieve that restriction...

...So, while it's true that a teenager doesn't have to fear his bank account being seized, it's not true to say that he can't have his CD collection seized...

...Another area of concern is the inclusion of patents in the scope of the directive. Patent law is much more complicated than other areas of IP law and much more open to abuse.

Legitimate companies who produce cheaper versions of medicines, for example, fear that the multinational drugs conglomerates will use this to stop the production of derivative medicines, so called 'generic medicines'...

...Perhaps the biggest disappointment in last week's European Parliament vote is that it was an opportunity lost. In an effort to rush through legislation before this June's elections we have ended up with a flawed directive.

Malcolm Harbour and Arlene McCarthy are right to say that the directive will be monitored and reviewed in due course. It's a great shame that so many people stand to suffer in the meantime in ways irrelevant to stamping out piracy and counterfeiting."

MacUser is reporting that "British government gets serious about open source" Which gives me an opportunity to mention a project launched yesterday by John Naughton and Quentin Stafford-Fraser called Ndiyo, (the Swahili word for 'yes') which has the small aim of changing the world. John likes a challenge.

It's all about bridging the digital divide (or more accurately, expanding the bubble of those included in the communications revolution) by using a new affordable hardware architecture and open source and free software.

In terms of architecture they're basically re-inventing the mainframe paradigm, the processing power of which can be shared by multiple users working from essentially dumb terminals. It's a slight variation on Larry Ellison's network computers from a few years back but workable on a local area basis. A clever, cheap, disposable, small box of tricks handles the local networking that let's the users at their terminals use the interact with the computer, which would be a PC equivalent. The box of tricks is currently proprietry technology, the patents on which are held by Newnham Research.

But Ndiyo are in the business of creating open standards to make a communications infrastructure equivalent to our plumbing or electrical network infrastructures, which everyone can have access to. They need companies like Newnham to manufacture the kit and break away from the Bill Gates enabled thinking trap about everyone needing a personal computer (running Microsoft software) but there is little stop another company to come up with their own version of networking box of tricks. In fact this piece of the infrastructure could be slimmed down to a single chip which could be mounted on the back of the monitor.

Given the vastly under-used processing power of most personal computers, or as Clay Shirky calls them "the dark matter of the internet", this kind of project is long overdue. It provides a huge potential to wire up inner cities, schools and public services at a tiny fraction of the cost of the equivalent in the WIntel universe. And that's just scratching the surface of what it could do in the affluent West.

Not many people know that about two thirds of the cost of an average PC is down to the licenses for Windows and Office software and the money goes straight to Microsoft. So using open source or free software provides an instant and vast cost saving.

I do have a slight worry about the reincarnation of the old monster, tyranno-sysadmin, who used to control computer users lives in relation to access to the sacred mainframe machines but that's a minor glitch in the scheme of things. There are also some technical obstacles ahead, as well as the issues of social protocol and questions of control over personal data, which brings me back again to the overall objective and the suitability of this new information architecture to the context, as well as, critically, they way the technology is deployed.

Nydiyo are committed to delivering three projects this year - a classroom in a box, an office in a box and an internet cafe in a box. Will John, Quentin and their small band of troops manage to change the world? Given an the ever increasing information feudalism we're seeing in the 'modern' world, I hope the answer is an emphatic Ndiyo.

Andrew Cringely recently asked "A Year Into the E-voting Crisis, Shouldn't We Have Noticed the Printer That's Already Built into Each Diebold Voting Machine?" Yet one of the spurious arguments against a verifiable paper audit trail is that is would cost too much to fit the printers to the e-voting machines.

Example:

"Meg Smothers of the League of Women Voters recently said that Georgia has 28,000 voting machines, and it would cost $15 million to retrofit them with printers to produce receipts. That comes to $535 per machine. "

I see. So we must employ computing in elections because computers are magic and they cost a lot, so they must be good. But we can't spend enough to make them actually work because it would cost too much. And it would cost too much because computers are pricey, so obviously if we want them to do anything extra (like print) that will cost a lot. And we are too stupid to realise that the computer will already do that extra thing we want it to do (i.e. print) - we just have to switch that part on. We are also too stupid to realise that because we don't even try to understand how computers work - because they are magic and we won't be able to. But we must have them for our elections because they are magic and using computers for anything will obviously make it better. That's alright then.

I wonder if any of these people ever heard of Josef Stalin? You know, the fellah that said "It is not the people who vote that count. It is the people who count the votes."

EU regulators have been meeting today to agree a draft ruling branding Microsoft a monopolist.

According to Xeni Jardin at Wired, the MPAA have drafted a letter for the California attorney general, Bill Lockyear, to circulate to fellow attorneys general, to encourage an all out legal assault on P2P file sharing software companies.

"The draft document, dated February 26, was obtained by Wired News on March 12. Distribution of a revised version to other attorneys general is said to coincide with the spring meeting in Washington, DC, March 15 to 17 of the National Association of
Attorneys General, of which Lockyer is president. The attorney general's office plans to release a final version publicly within the coming month, after obtaining additional signatories.

"We do not wish to make any comment at this time on any document that the office of the attorney general may or may not be developing," said Tom Dressler, spokesperson for Bill Lockyer in Sacramento. "But we remain concerned about the potential dangers posed to the public by peer-to-peer file-sharing technology."

However, the metadata associated with the Microsoft Word document indicates it was either drafted or reviewed by a senior vice president of the Motion Picture Association of America. According to this metadata (automatically generated by the Word application), the document's author or editor is "stevensonv." (The metadata of a document is viewable through the File menu under Properties.)

Sources tell Wired News that the draft letter's authorship is attributed to Vans Stevenson, the MPAA's senior vice president for state legislative affairs. MPAA representatives have issued similar criticisms of P2P technology in the past. Stevenson could not be reached for comment. "

Extract from the letter:

"As a P2P software developer and distributor, we believe you have the ability and responsibility to better educate consumers about these known risks, and to design your software in a manner that minimizes the risks. We view with grave concern reports that at least some P2P software developers may be adding features deliberately designed to hinder law enforcement in its prosecution of crimes using P2P software. Companies that engage in such conduct, and fail to meet the important responsibilities referenced above, harm the interests of consumers in our States.

It is widely recognized that P2P file-sharing software currently is used almost exclusively to disseminate pornography, and to illegally trade copyrighted music, movies, software and video games. File-sharing software also is increasingly
becoming a means to disseminate computer worms and viruses. Nevertheless, your company still does little to warn consumers about the legal and personal risks they face when they use your software to "share" copyrighted music, movies and computer software. A failure to prominently and adequately warn consumers, particularly when you advertise and sell paid versions of your software, could constitute, at the very least, a deceptive trade practice...

...Whether it is the widespread availability of pornography, including child pornography, the disclosure of sensitive personal information to millions of people, the exposure to pernicious computer worms and viruses, or the threat of legal liability for copyright infringement, P2P file-sharing software has proven costly and dangerous for many consumers...

Over the coming months, we will begin focusing more attention on the risks P2P software programs pose to consumers in our States. We hope this inquiry will encourage you to take proactive, concrete and meaningful steps to address the problems we have raised in this letter.... We take seriously our responsibility to protect consumers and ensure that the laws of our States are respected. In the future, we will not hesitate to take whatever actions we deem necessary to ensure that you fulfill your duties as a responsible corporate citizen.

The states of New York and Wisconsin have announced that they are withdrawing from the controversial MATRIX interstate database program. MATRIX is the state level version of the now scrapped Total Information Awareness program, which had the aim of sucking in vast swathes of personal data on everyone, thereby enabling the computer to automatically pinpoint the terrorists in our midst.

It sounds a superfically and intuitively attractive prospect, until you think about it. What if the computer or the operator gets it wrong? Like I said earlier. Law enforcement is difficult. And, as H.L. Mencken said, "For every human problem there is a solution which is simple, neat and wrong." We're right back to the old theme which I seem to come back to repeatedly, the widespread

"Boys-Own blind faith of computing ignoramuses, like certain decision makers, in the ability of computers to automatically and magically make things better, regardless of the overall objective or the suitability of the tools (computers) to the task or [critically] the way in which those tools are deployed, drives me nuts on a daily basis in my own day job. That it is happening in so important a context " as [choose your own context - in this case I choose 'law enforcement'] "is worrying in the extreme"

Ernest Miller is well worth reading on the problems law enforcement authorities have in surveilling the Net. The FBI are seeking to expand Carnivore. Miller's repsonse? They're onto a hiding to nothing because of the architecture of the Net.

"The amount of intervention in technology development necessary for the FBI and DOJ to accomplish what they want with regard to wiretapping is enormous. The costs will be both direct (money out of consumer's pockets) and indirect (loss of innovation). However, that is only half the picture. Unfortunately for the FBI, the costs to defeat the wiretapping are relatively small and will continue to decrease. We have here an asymmetric situation that will only grow more asymmetric as time goes on.

The problem is with the underlying architecture of the internet. Advances in technology along with the end-to-end/layers principle mean that it will always be cheaper to add encryption to the edges of the network than to increase the amount of surveillance at the center of the network. How much does it cost to write an encrypted VoIP app? Not much. How much does it cost to build the surveillance mechanism and conduct the surveillance across all possible ISPs? A heck of a lot more.

Ok. Now that the first encrypted VoIP app is compromised ... how much will it cost to build another encrypted layer on top of the first one? How much will it cost to conduct surveillance on this new layer? Hmmmm, if this progression continues, as we add additional layers of encryption and surveillance, the costs will increasingly diverge. Not a game you can win ultimately. In fact, it doesn't make much sense to even start. The FBI should be happy with what they've got...

...If I were the FBI, I wouldn't waste my time on a battle I ultimately couldn't win and instead would concentrate my efforts on the place where I could still achieve my goals - the ends. You want to know what someone is up to online? I would recommend, for example, key loggers, "real" spyware, and social engineering. It ain't gonna be easy, but you have a chance of winning in the long term. The sooner you quit a race you can't win, the faster you can enter a race where you have a chance."

He's got a point but it's one that takes longer than three seconds to grasp, so I don't see the politicos getting it any time soon. It's easy to spend lots of money and say we are spending lots of money fighting crime, and spin an illusion that such tactics work. It's hard to do the kinds of things Ernest is talking about and there are no simple tick box targets to wave in front of the media to illustrate success.

But law enforcement is hard.

Back to one of my hobby horses of recent times and a Wired report, Legislators Urge E-Voting Halt.

"State Sens. Don Perata (D-Oakland) and Ross Johnson (R-Irvine), the chairman and vice chairman of the Senate election committee, sent a letter to Secretary of State Kevin Shelley urging him to decertify all paperless touch-screen voting machines before the general election...

..."California has a lemon law that protects consumers if they buy a bad car," Johnson said at the press conference. "So far, e-voting in California is a lemon." He said Californians should demand no less oversight for voting machines."

Usually I hate soundbites. That one, I like.

The NYT reported on Friday that Microsoft has been encouraging big investment in SCO. There has been a fair degree of speculation about this ever since SCO launched their legal campaign against linux but the NYT have seen an email with specifics. Interesting, though hardly earth shattering.

There are a fair few reports around on the implementation of the IPR enforcement directive of which this EurActiv one is relatively typical. It is a sad irony that the Irish government should be instrumental in steering a pathway for this directive through Parliament, the Commission and the Council. Prior to their implementation last year of the copyright and related rights directive of 2001, the Irish government was one of the few which recognised an explicit right to bypass digital fences for fair dealing purposes. Section 374 of the Copyright and Related Rights Act 2000 allowed the circumvention of "rights protection measures" when the purpose was to access and use the protected work in ways otherwise permitted by copyright law.

Excellent Greplaw interview with Seth Finkelstein.

On Tuesday, 9th March, the same say they were passing the intellectual property enforcement directive, the EU parliament

"...adopted a Resolution saying that the 1995 Data Protection Directive was not working because of lack of resources, powers of enforcement, and lack of political will by national governments and the European Commission. The Resolution condemned the handing over of passenger data on people flying to the USA because it is contrary to EU law and the 1995 Directive.

The Resolution was passed by 439 votes in favour, 39 against and 28 abstentions"

Tony Bunyan, Statewatch editor, comments:

"The European Parliament has decided, overwhelmingly, that data protection in the EU is not working. It has also decided that the transfer of personal data (PNR) on airline passengers to the USA - which has no data protection laws for non-US citizens - would "flagrantly breach" EU law.

At the end of this month the European Parliament will be asked to vote again on the question of whether or not the USA offers "adequate" protection of data for EU citizens flying there. National government will put a lot of pressure on MEPs to "toe the line" and accept the "deal" already agreed by the 15 EU governments.

All the evidence shows that people cannot rely on governments to protect their right to privacy, nor on the European Commission, for the future of democracy in Europe. Let us hope they can rely on the European Parliament"

There is a sharp and witty (but not for the easily-offended) analogous scenario to the SCO case drawn up by Simon Travaglia over at the Register, BOFH: Protecting bodily waste in the public domain. It captures some of the current excesses in the application of intellectual property law beautifully.

Victory for EFF Creates Problems for EFF's Filesharing Solution. Ernest Miller spot on as ever.

"Pennsylvania Federal judge has ordered the RIAA lawsuit charging 203 Comcast subscribers with copyright infringement be broken up into 203 separate lawsuits...

This is certainly a victory for the rights of those accused of copyright infringement, providing a high degree of protection to those who may have been falsely accused. It also greatly complicates the ability of copyright owners to prosecute wide spread infringement and places a greater burden on our court system. A reasonable tradeoff, but it also has other effects as well. For example, it also makes it almost impossible to enforce EFF's voluntary collective music licensing scheme on an individual basis...

In short, why would the majority of filesharers pay $5/month when they can get everything free from the minority of people who do pay? This latest victory, however, makes EFF's position virtually impossible to enforce on an individual basis..."

According to the NYT, the Bush administration have "set forth a new, more limited view of privacy rights as it tries to force hospitals and clinics to turn over records of hundreds and perhaps thousands of abortions."

Some possible good news on the IP front, though possibly not for Microsoft hating purists, is that the US Patent and Trademark office, having reviewed the patent they granted Eolas Technologies on browser technology, have apparently decided to invalidate the patent. This is the patent at the centre of the case where Eolas were awarded $520 million against Microsoft for patent infringement last summer. Judge James Zagel had recently, in February 2004, upheld the jury's original verdict.

This one is likely to run and run.

Robin Gross and Ross Anderson, organisations like FIPR and FFII, and many likeminded individuals will be greatly lamenting the European Parliament passing the intellectual property enforcement directive yesterday, Tuesday, 9 March, 2004. Looks like the CODE alliance, "an international coalition of civil liberties groups and consumer rights initiatives to protect consumer rights, innovation, and competition against the proposed European Union Directive on the Enforcement of Intellectual Property", has failed.

I understand that Pat Cox, the Irish head of the parliament, has said that the issue of the appearance of a potential conflict of interest involving the driving rapporteur, Jannelly Fourtou, whose husband, Jean-Rene Fourtou, is CEO of Vivendi Universal, would be raised in the Parliament Bureau. The question was raised during the voting session by MEP Neil MacCormick of the Scotish National Party.

The Competitiveness Council will rubber stamp the directive tomorrow and then 25 EU member states will be obliged to implement it into their national laws. CODE are unlikely to give up their campaign but it will have to be fought in relation to specific implementations in 25 jurisdictions now, rather than getting important checks and balances written into the directive itself. The specifics could mean the difference between having private security firms raiding homes in the middle of the night on the basis of very little evidence or requiring such raids only to be undertaken by official law enforcement authorities in response evidence 'beyond reasonable doubt' that someone is engaging in major intellectual property infringement. Even then I don't see why the directive could not have restricted this to commercial scale operations.

Parents of tech-savvy music loving teenagers would be particularly well advised to keep an eye on this. But it will be completely meaningless to most, even if it did get within touching distance of their awareness.

The gory detail of the directive is available at IP Justice.

Unlike many libertarians, Harvey Silvergate and Carl Takei don't see the PATRIOT act as the biggest threat to civil liberties in the US. They are more worried about what they believe to be the undermining of the little known legal writ of 'habeus corpus' (essentially a legal challenge to the detention of someone in either official custody or private hands).

"THIS IS NOT the first time the executive branch has tried to limit habeas corpus. In 1996, President Clinton signed into law the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act. This law created a series of procedural hurdles making it more difficult for civilians charged with criminal offenses to use habeas to challenge the validity of an original trial on appeal...

The current curtailment of the writ is even more dangerous than President Lincoln?s wartime suspension of habeas. Lincoln, though he initially acted on his own, sought congressional authorization as soon as practicable, calling a special session to consider his wartime measures...

For civil libertarians, of course, the most egregious example of past habeas corpus violations remains the notorious internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II. The facts are well-known: the US government forced some 110,000 Americans of Japanese ancestry, two-thirds of whom were US citizens, out of their homes and into military internment camps for the duration of the war, allegedly because suspected saboteurs were hiding in Japanese-American communities. In a 1944 decision widely criticized as a nadir for American civil liberties and judicial review, the Supreme Court in Korematsu v. United States gave the internment program the imprimatur of constitutionality. In this extraordinary move, the judiciary deferred to a military measure that treated citizens like prisoners of war...

Yet in three important respects the Japanese internment cases did less damage to basic principles of democracy than today?s assault on habeas corpus threatens to do. First, in the WWII cases, the government felt compelled to concoct an elaborate lie to convince the court of its noble intentions, which suggests that it took seriously the need to persuade the court that detention was necessary. Today the government is not showing even that backhanded measure of deference to a co-equal branch of government, choosing instead to submit nothing more than two-to-three-page statements written by officials without firsthand knowledge and expecting courts to acquiesce without questioning the evidence or hearing anything from the other side. Second, in the WWII cases, detained citizens had the opportunity to consult lawyers and attempt to rebut falsehoods presented by the government. Finally, although the Japanese internment orders affected a much larger number of people than the "terror" detentions have done thus far, the WWII internment was limited by the finite duration of the war. In contrast, the present ill-defined "war on terrorism" and the attendant detentions have no foreseeable end."

There's an interesting interview with Gerald Santucci, "Head of the 'Trust & Security' Unit for the EC Directorate-General Information" Society at the European Biometrics Forum.

My experience as an Election Judge in Baltimore County by Avi Rubin

Wonderful.

Mark Fiore on electronic voting. Wonderful.

There's another interesting piece from Mr Schwartz at the NTY, this time on a report suggesting the entertainment industry's approach to fighting piracy is bad for business and the economy.

Larry Lessig has welcomed the report. Jane Ginsburg, renowned copyright expert at Columbia University, has welcomed some of the recommendations though criticises it as making misleading statements about copyright law.

The Bunner DVD DeCSS case has been decided by the California Appeal court having been referred back from the California Supreme Court last year. The Appeal Court overturned the injunction banning the posting of the code on the web, finding a first amendment violation; also that there was no evidence that CSS was a trade secret when Bunner posted the descrambler.

Tomorrow sees the biggest test of electronic voting machines when millions of voters will use them in ten states in the US. John Schwartz at the NYT gives a nice summary of the current situation.

Even voting on that scale fades a little compared to the proposed all electronic October election in India. Over half a billion people voting on more than a million machines supplied by just two companies. Scary.

The EU IPR enforcement directive is to get the fast track approval procedure according to the excellent EDRI-gram Newsletter - Number 2.4, 27 February 2004. Details on the problems with the directive can be found at the CODE campaign at IP Justice. Andreas Dietl, EDRI EU affairs director, says:

"The European Union's disputed Directive on the Enforcement of
Intellectual Property Rights is scheduled for a fast-track procedure that
may lead to it being adopted by the European Council in little more than
two weeks. At present, it is still under discussion in the Brussels
Parliament. The Rapporteur, French Conservative Janelly Fourtou, and the
Council both wish to pass this Directive in First Reading, before the
enlargement of the European Union. Trying to avoid delay by too much
discussion, they have each chosen the fastest procedure possible in their
respective institutions.

The final discussion about the report in the Parliament's Legal Affairs
Committee took place on Monday 23 February. The item was scheduled at the
very last minute, the Friday before, when most of the Members of
Parliament were already gone. With many MEPs still on their way to
Brussels on Monday, only 14 MEPs were present. The discussion only lasted
15 minutes after the Council and the Commission had ended their formal
introductions.

The longest speeches were given by Arlene McCarthy MEP (Social Democrat,
UK) and Malcolm Harbour MEP (Conservative, UK), who both claimed that this
Directive was not mainly about the Digital world, but about counterfeiting
of tangible goods. There is no proof for that in the text, however.

Technically, the debate was about the amendments that the Rapporteur had
laid down, together with McCarthy and with Toine Manders (Liberal,
Netherlands) and which reflect verbatim the Common Position of the
Council. This position had been fine-tuned, behind closed doors, in five
so-called trilogue meetings between the Parliament and the Council during
the previous weeks. The Legal Affairs Committee did not vote on the
amendments of Mrs. Fourtou: she chose to table them directly to the
Plenary.

MEPs may now lay down additional amendments until 4 March. The vote will
take place on 9 March in Strasbourg, preceded by a plenary debate the day
before. Already on 10 March, the outcome of the vote will be considered by
the Council's Committee of Permanent Representatives (COREPER). On 11
March, on the occasion of the meeting of the EU Competitiveness Council,
ministers may sign it off if it has been agreed by the Permanent
Representatives.

Though some of the concerns of civil society and internet providers have
been taken into account in the drafting of the Common Position, the text
remains problematic. The scope of the directive is extended to cover "any
infringement of intellectual property rights as provided for by Community
law and/or by the national law of the Member State concerned." At the same
time, the Commission's initial limitation to infringements which are
"committed for commercial purposes or cause significant harm to the right
holder" has been deleted.

The term "intellectual property rights" is not defined, creating the
possibility of a large range of abuses. Because the enforcement is not
limited to large-scale infringements, kids downloading songs from the
internet risk the same kind of treatment as large-scale counterfeiters of
trademark designer clothes.

EDRI-member organisation FIPR has prepared a set of amendments to deal
with the worst deficits in this Directive and is preparing, together with
a range of other organisations, a rally in Strasbourg to promote these
amendments and to encourage MEPs to vote against the Directive if some
minimum requirements are not fulfilled.

The European Commission's initial proposal for a Directive
http://europa.eu.int/smartapi/cgi/sga_doc?smartapi!celexplus!prod!CELEXnumdoc&numdoc=32001L0029&lg=EN

Amendments proposed by FIPR and EDR
http://www.ffii.org.uk/ip_enforce/andreas2.html

Campaign Info
http://www.ipjustice.org/CODE/ "

EDRI-gram also reports on the EU plan to introduce biometric passports I mentioned here recently.

I've done a fair bit of grumbling about the current state of the deployment of electronic voting machines but put it down to the cock-up rather than the conspiracy theory of life, since there has been no hard evidence of any electoral fraud (and lots of evidence of incompetence and cover up of that incompetence). Dr. Bob Fitrakis, senior editor of the Free Press, thinks there is a vast right wing conspiracy going on here.

It's all circumstantial neptoism and invisible-hand stuff with allegations, though no direct proof, of possible electoral manipulation but nevertheless an interesting read. If all the connections referred to are cosher then they could, at least, raise the appearance of impropriety. I really don't believe the Diebold folk and other electronic voting machine suppliers to date are avoiding the voter verifiable paper trail for any deep conspiratorial reasons, though. (I hope they are not anyway, in a world were powerful vested interests of all political persuasions are always angling for that extra edge). It's just that if you happen to have good market penetration with a less-than-perfect product, the short term marketing response to that knowledge leaking out is to try and cover it up.

Ernest Miller likes most of the EFF solution to the P2P file sharing problem.

"A Significant Problem: Using Any Software Won't Cut It

Why? Free riders. If people are permitted to freely share files on existing P2P systems, there goes any chance you have of limiting free riding.

Under EFF's proposed system, say I go ahead and get a license. For $5/month I can fileshare with impunity, that is, I can upload songs all day long. The free riders in this system will be the people downloading the songs from me. How do you enforce against downloaders? You can't, at least without draconian technical and legal enforcement mechanisms which I am sure the EFF would rightfully oppose.

What will happen under EFF's system is that a significant number of people will sign up for the system, say 10-20% of the filesharing population (if you are lucky). At this point, you stop getting subscriptions, because the free riders can get all the music they want for free, without fear of legal sanction. Sure, you might have some foolish people who both download and upload, but not many and all you'll do is turn them into legitimate uploaders for a small fee/fine. Suddenly, your $3 Billion/year is only $600 Million or $300 Million. Additionally many fee-paying subscribers will feel like suckers for paying"

He has a solution though - compulsory licenses.

"Compulsory licenses avoid this problem by forcing everyone to pay, regardless. This comes at the expense of heavily involving government, which should be a last ditch solution."

The UK government have published a discussion paper in response to the Newton Report which recommended that the Part 4 powers in the 2001 Anti-Terrorism Crime and Security Act, which allow indefinite detention of foreign terrorist suspects, should be replaced with new legislation. Lord Newton recommended new powers to apply to British as well as foreign nationals, to avoid having to opt out of a part of the European Convention on Human Rights. I doubt most people will be interested in purusing the full 123 pages but it would really be worthwhile for you to read the main principles and conclusions on pages 8 and 9 of the Newton report. The principles state that the report recognises that the individual has the right to liberty and privacy and that the authorities have a duty to take the necessary steps to protect society from terrorism. It explicitly recognises the need for special counter terrorism legislation but says it should be kept distinct from mainstream criminal law and limited to dealing with terrorism. And it implicitly criticises the David Blunkett approach of introducing emergency legislation supposedly to deal with terrorism but having the provisions so broadly drafted that they apply to petty crime. "The enactment of mainstream legislation using emergency procedures undermines the consensus for the use of such procedures in justifiable cases." Our Home Secretary won't have liked that. At the other end of the scale pure libertarians won't be overly enamoured with "the blanket ban on the use of intercepted communications as evidence in court should be lifted to make it possible to prosecute more terrorists (and other serious criminals) and the government should examine the scope for more intensive use of surveillance to prevent and disrupt terrorism."

All very topical this week in the light of the dropping of the prosecution of Katharine Gun and Claire Short's attempts to take revenge on Tony Blair with allegations of illicit spying on the UN.

According to the Independent, the general angst about electronic voting is spreading in Ireland.

Taoiseach Bertie Ahern is dismissive of concerns and determined that an auditable paper trail will not be built into the system.

"We are not going to go back to pushing pieces of paper around the place," he said, accusing a critic of wanting "to keep old ways, old things, the old nonsensical past".

I guess he means that "old nonsensical past" where the election system was transparent, had impeccable integrity, it was simple to vote (mark the ballot paper and stick it in the box) and had a clear audit trail so that any anomalies could be reviewed openly. But it was, of course, terrible that it might take a few days to get the final results.

The new system will provide instant results (yahoo! - I use the word in its original sense prior to the Internet age) and a windfall for voting machine manufacturers all for 40m Euros(£26m). But no transparency, no simplicity, no audit trail, no confidence, no integrity...

Governments get five years if they win the election. Is democracy not worth a few days to make sure the results of the election are accurate? In the words of Milton Friedman in the Eldred amicus brief, this one is a complete "no brainer" for me. This ubiquitous Boys-Own blind faith of computing ignoramuses, like certain decision makers, in the ability of computers to automatically and magically make things better, regardless of the overall objective or the suitability of the tools (computers) to the task or [critically] the way in which those tools are deployed, drives me nuts on a daily basis in my own day job. That it is happening in so important a context of the integrity of our democracies is worrying in the extreme. Mr Ahern should not knock paper. It is still the best available technology for voting (imho).

Greplaw have done an interview with Jessica Litman. Lovely quote about Jessica thinking of herself as an older sister to Harry and I hadn't previously come across her Breakfast with Batman paper.

The Association of Chief Police Officers in the UK have accused the Information Commissioner of putting children at risk for ordering the "destruction of valuable criminal intelligence."

"In one case, in July 2003, the commissioner demanded that South Yorkshire police delete from a woman's record a juvenile conviction for actual bodily harm dating from 1979...

In September 2003 a similar request was made of West Yorkshire police over a man who wanted juvenile convictions that carried a three-month custodial sentence to be "weeded out" of his record.

In a case with echoes of Huntley, the commissioner asked an unnamed police force to delete intelligence relating to allegations that a man sexually assaulted young males in 1991 and 1998."

The notion that a juvenille conviction from 1979 (25 years ago) should be held against someone is a bit excessive. What about the juvenille conviction leading to a custodial sentence or someone with serious allegations stemming from 1998? It's difficult to say without more specifics of the individual cases. What's certain is that the police have a very difficult job but they do need to recognise that the Information Commissioner does too. Very often an organisation's interpretation of the Data Protection Act bears little relationship to the actual requirements of the act. There is a judgement call to be made on the merits of individual cases and the perception on where the dividing line should fall will vary depending on the values and objectives of the institution or the indivual. ACPO and the Information Commissioner, if the story is to be believed, have different perspectives on the boundaries.

There's a nice quote from Jonathan Zittrain in a New York Times article on the "Grey Album" (a re-mix of some Beatles tracks with some recent rap music) dispute:

"As a matter of pure legal doctrine, the Grey Tuesday protest is breaking the law, end of story. But copyright law was written with a particular form of industry in mind. The flourishing of information technology gives amateurs and home-recording artists powerful tools to build and share interesting, transformative, and socially valuable art drawn from pieces of popular culture. There's no place to plug such an important cultural sea change into the current legal regime."

Statewatch Editor Tony Bunyan is none too pleased at the EU plans to introduce biometric passports.

"For EU citizens getting a passport is quite straightforward, you fill in the form, get your picture taken in a photo booth and simply post both to the passport office. This simple process is about to change: to get a passport you will have to present yourself to an "enrolment centre" where a special picture will be taken of you and then you will have to have your fingerprints taken. These will then be held on a European database with personal data."

The political decision to introduce compulsory biometric identifiers, first on visas and residence permits and then on passports, was taken at two Informal meetings of Justice and Home Affairs Ministers (in February 2002 and then in March 2003). The Commission argued for a so-called "coherent approach" for "all travel documents, including the passports of EU citizens". These decisions were not reported at the time. It was the European Councils (the meeting of EU prime ministers) at Thessaloniki in June 2003 and later in Brussels on 12 December 2003 who formally endorsed the proposal. A secondary reason for bringing in biometrics on EU passports, the Commission argues, is that the USA is demanding them on passports too.

The legal basis for the proposal is highly dubious, see: Commission’s EU biometric passport proposal exceeds the EC’s powers, Statewatch legal analysis concludes that: "no powers conferred upon the EC by the EC Treaty, taken separately or together, confer upon the EC the power to adopt the proposed Regulation"

The ignorance in the making of these decisions about biometric identity as a surrogate for security continues to be staggering and it would be laughable if it wasn't so serious. I could mutter 'security is a trade off ' and 'biometrics may be unique (mostly) but they're not secret' and 'identity is no gaurantee of security' and 'statistically the bigger the biometric database the bigger the error rate' and 'false positives' and 'false negatives' and 'information overload' and 'well resourced clever human intelligence' and ''security is only as strong as the weakest link', but there's not much chance of getting heard by the 'war on terrorism' gang. And the sad thing is that I don't even know that much about security but even I can see the sense of people who really do know about it like Bruce Schneier. What kind of a world our our children going to grow up into?

321 Studios have lost their DMCA battle against the movie industry.

"Judge Susan Illston ruled Friday in San Francisco that software made by
Chesterfield, Mo.-based 321 Studios violates the 1998 Digital Millennium
Copyright Act, which prohibits the circumvention of anti-piracy measures such
as the Content Scramble System protecting movies on DVDs.

The judge ordered the company to cease making or distributing such software
within seven days of her order."

The company has said they will appeal.

Michael Froomkin recalled some advice from his grandmother recently in reflecting on the Bush administration's response to the atrocities of 9/11 and Siva Vaidhyanathan's confession of self-censorship when going through airport security at Newark.

I learn from The Filter that there's a nice summary of the controversy surrounding the Diebold electronic voting machines and leaked internal memos at the Berkman Center. Section "5.0 The Implications" seems to be repeated twice. Possibly for emphasis? Probably in error. I'm sure the Berkmanites will correct it pretty quickly.

I was telling some friends over lunch on Wednesday that I had just heard a BBC radio report on the problems with trying to play copy protected CDs in certain Vokswagen CD players. It seems that Andrew Orlowski at the Register heard the same report and has written about it: Copy-crippled CDs launch in UK, baffling Auntie Beeb.

Orlowski reports the conversation very accurately. What I can't get is how a hardened consumer-advocate journalist lets by openings like those provided by the BPI spokesman. He tells her the CD standards have been around for a long time and then says the CD manufacturers have recently "enhanced CDs" with new features (i.e. copy protection). And the effect of these new features is that the CD produces silence when played i.e. doesn't work. It's a bit like Raleigh saying 'we decided to take the wheels off our bikes to reduce bicycle thefts and improve our service to customers; and don't blame us that the bikes are no good for cycling, the government should have adapted the road transport infrastructure to take account of our changes.'

As to the notion that "The CD em player that he's got in his car is not actually, eh supposed initially to play audio CDs." Oh you mean that road was not meant for cycling my wheel-free-enhanced bike on? Even the BPI spokesman thinks "Now that might sound a bit strange" and the journalist still doesn't pounce.

You just could not make this stuff up.

All I can suggest to irritated, music loving, Volkswagen owners is to try to ensure not to have too many passengers when trying to play copy protected CDs. You might find yourself getting sued by the John Cage estate for infringing (public performance) their copyright in silence. Incidentally the real settlement figure was not the six figure sum the BBC report here but it was substantial and somewhere between four and six figures.

The EFF have posted a recording of the oral arguments in the MGM v Grokster appeal hearing. MGM's lawyer took a bit of a battering from the judges. I don't know whether that gives any indicator as to the ultimate decision in the case but isn't it fantastic to able to get direct access to this kind of material.

The NYT have a profile of Bram Cohen who created BitTorrent, the file sharing software that speeds up the downloading process for large files (such as digital films) and has the movie industry so worried.

"Under older file-sharing systems like Napster and Kazaa, only a small subset of
users actually share files with the world. Most users simply download, or leech, in cyberspace parlance.

BitTorrent, however, uses what could be called a Golden Rule principle: the faster you upload, the faster you are allowed to download. BitTorrent cuts up files into many little pieces, and as soon as a user has a piece, they immediately start uploading that piece to other users. So almost all of the people who are sharing a given file are simultaneously uploading and downloading pieces of the same file (unless their downloading is complete).

The practical implication is that the BitTorrent system makes it easy to distribute very large files to large numbers of people while placing minimal bandwidth requirements on the original "seeder." That is because everyone who wants the file is sharing with one another, rather than downloading from a central source. A separate file-sharing network known as eDonkey uses a similar system."

Copyfighters are grappling with the implications of the Appeals Court decision earlier in the week on DMCA [alleged] copyright infringement notice and takedown procedures for ISPs. The case was Ellison v. Robertson et al.

Some light relief from the Onion on the Patriot Act.

Roger Clarke is getting exorcised about the Australian government's misrepresentation of the value of face recognition technologies.

"It's very likely that a project called SmartGate, conducted by the Australian Customs Service, will be trumpeted throughout the world as the good news that face-recognition technology has been waiting for.

This email contains an assessment of the extreme manipulation of data, truth and the media on which such 'good news' stories will be based...

The brazenness of Custom's manipulation of media and public opinion exceeds the standards normally expected of the Government.

(1) No data has been provided, despite assurances given in the past that data would be provided.

(2) The invited experts who were paraded by Customs are arguably about the world's two foremost designers of testing for biometric technologies.

But is appears that:

they did not *perform* the tests
they did not *design* the tests...

... The best quotation that Customs seem to have been able to extract from the two experts was that "the scheme's performance is remarkably good for an operational facial recognition system".

That seems quite positive, until you realise that the other attempts around the world have been abject failures, and pilot after pilot has been quietly abandoned.

In other words, the quotation can be readily interpreted as "it doesn't work very well, but it's better than the other disasters we've seen".

This is borne out by an answer by one of the experts to a reporter's question. He said: "In one test 100 company employees attempted to impersonate someone other than themselves and eight of them were falsely accepted by the system. That is a very
low rate of false accepts". At that"very low" level of false acceptances, every 747-load of people can include 25-30 terrorists..."

Roger is clearly not too happy and you can't blame him. Deployment of lousy expensive technology to create the illusion of improved security does nobody any favours. And whilst the over-stretched authorities are distracted dealing with processing those 25-30 innocents per planeload, the real terrorists have a clear run at their targets.

Roger has an informative general introduction to biometrics on the web.